The Return of Captain John Emmett (10 page)

He mulled over a few other vague ideas. Could Mr Emmett Senior have been married before, and Mrs Lovell been a half-sister of John's? Unlikely, he thought; she and her daughter were unusually fair-haired and fair-skinned, while John, like his father, was dark-haired and brown-eyed. Anyway, in that case Mrs Lovell would surely have recognised the name Emmett instantly when she received the letter and he doubted John's father was old enough to have squeezed in an earlier marriage. It was equally unlikely that Catherine Lovell was actually an illegitimate child of Mr Emmett and Mrs Lovell, making her a half-sister to John and Mary.

So, the uncomplicated and old-fashioned Cecil Emmett— a man whose main relationship seemed to be with his animals and the kitchen garden, and who refused to spend a night away from home—hardly seemed the type to maintain a handsome widow in a North London villa. His favourite phrase had been, Always set things right,' which he applied to everything from not leaving tennis balls in the rain to having cottages repaired for aged tenants while his own roof leaked. However, there were also Charles's allegations about his carelessness with money.

Could there really be some connection with Germany? If so, Laurence couldn't begin to think how it could be unravelled now. By the time it began to get dark, he had decided to ask Charles to check the name Lovell with some of his army cronies. Charles would find the mystery irresistible. He should have asked Mrs Lovell for her son's regiment but Charles would enjoy finding it.

The one idea he'd been mulling over since his first meeting with Mary was seeing Holmwood for himself. He had rejected his initial vague notion as reckless once he got home, but in the absence of other answers he was starting to think that it wouldn't be so difficult to carry off; he could simply present himself as looking for a place for a troubled relative. It would be a gesture to prove his commitment to finding out more about John Emmett.

The next morning he wrote to Mary to propose it again. She wrote back by return of post and with such enthusiasm that his heart sank slightly as he realised he was now committed to a deceit. However, his spirits rose at the rest of her letter, which described the easterly wind, leaves falling, Michaelmas undergraduates wandering about like lost schoolboys in their gowns, and how she had been to a recital in Trinity chapel which she thought he might have enjoyed. She added, almost as an afterthought, that she had found a few more of John's things although there was nothing remarkable among them. Next time they met, she'd bring them. She hoped this would be soon—she underlined the word soon. It was a very different Mary, more informal and light-hearted than in her earlier letter.

Buoyed up by her tone, he wrote to Holmwood immediately. Mary had said they had installed a telephone system although he was in no great hurry. Wanting it to seem like an ordinary enquiry, he created an older brother, Robert, who owed quite a lot to a character in a book by John Buchan, but was, additionally and essentially, given to melancholy and seizures, having being injured at Loos. He went out to the postbox straight away, before he could deliberate any further, but after he'd posted his letter he wondered whether the fits were too much. On the way back, he picked up a newspaper from the news boy in the square; since he had started involving himself with John Emmett, he had found his broader curiosity for the world returning intermittently.

When he got in, not being in the mood to look at his work, he opened his sister's letter. It was full of the usual cheerful inconsequentialities and devoid of any sense of what she was thinking, only of what she—or, more often, other people—were doing. He felt saddened by the distance that had come between them; even the vocabulary of her life seemed old-fashioned, as if time as well as oceans separated them.

He thought back to school and the days when his parents were both alive. His father had been a handsome man who, his mother feared, had an eye for other women. Laurence remembered how funny this had seemed at the time, when he was fourteen or so, with his father in his late forties, and his mother sensitive to any straying glance or conversation.

'Oh Laurie,' she would say anxiously, 'your teacher, Miss Beames, do you think she might be generally considered pretty? Did you see your father talking to her?' Or, whispered on a bus, 'Did you see the way your father looked at that young lady he gave his seat up to? Did you get the feeling he knew her already?' His sister would roll her eyes.

Who would be interested in that old man? Laurence had thought to himself then.

He wondered who young Wilfred, his eldest nephew, took after. At the end of the year he would find out. When he had eventually read his sister's latest news, he was alarmed to find that his oldest nephew was being sent to school in England after Christmas. He could tell that his sister wanted him to be Wilfred's guardian. He rather hoped the boy had not inherited too many characteristics of his sister's stout, red-faced husband but he was nonetheless glad his dead parents had living grandchildren.

Now he scanned an account of a vast industrial explosion in Germany and briefly felt compassion for the families of the dead, whatever their nationality. Pity was like blood returning, painfully, to a leg with cramp. The other lead story concerned the hunt for the killer of a senior police officer who had been shot dead as he left his office. The policeman had been involved in two high-profile cases with violent foreign gangs. A police spokesman said there were still no clues but there was an increasing problem with the number of side arms in circulation after the war. Laurence thought, briefly, of John. Would he have killed himself anyway, even if he hadn't had a gun?

In an opinion piece he discovered that Brinsmead Pianos had opened under new ownership. He read this article in more detail. Louise's piano—his piano—had been a Brinsmead. He thought the firm had been broken by the piano workers' strike of the previous year. Guns. Strikers. Discontent. He found himself wondering how Eleanor Bolitho would see it all. An editorial in his paper viewed Brinsmead's reemergence as a triumph of capitalism over the Bolshevist threat. From what Eleanor had said of her political beliefs, he thought she might rejoice in the workers asserting themselves, even if it did lead to a dearth of music in middle-class parlours.

Next to the pianos was a poor picture of a politician and an illustrious army commander, speaking together at a public meeting in Birmingham. They were arguing that war, any war but especially the Great War, was not a matter of heroism but endurance. They had been heckled at first, the article said, but the hecklers had themselves been shouted down. Laurence recognised the men; it was the pair Charles had been so excited to meet at his club: Morrell, the former MP, and the retired general, Somers. He had been wrong in his assumption that the retired officer would be a stickler for the harshest discipline. Perhaps speaking out now was another form of courage.

It was interesting, Laurence mused, reading on, how some people were beginning to feel they could say these things now without their patriotism being called into question. Charles had told him that another MP—Lambert Ward—whose own recent service with the Royal Naval Reserve had provided him with a shield of valour, had demanded executed deserters be buried in military graves with all the other fallen soldiers. Charles himself was surprisingly indifferent.

'Who cares?' he said. 'One way or another, they're all gone.'

Until John Emmett rose from the dead into his life, Laurence had almost convinced himself the war was history but now he saw that its aftershocks rumbled on and on, and that peace had nothing to do with signatures and seals on a paper.

He started to read about the paper poppies they were making for Armistice Day this year. It was a new idea—started in America. He couldn't imagine wearing one; he even disliked fresh poppies—but perhaps some families wanted a visible sign of all they had lost.

The wind had got up and the windows rattled. He tore a strip off the page and wedged the frame fast. He returned to the mutilated newspaper and started on an obituary of a centenarian who had fought under Elphinstone in the First Afghan War and survived the massacre at the Gandamak Pass. His last thought as the paper slipped to the floor was how small wars used to be.

Over the next week his own eagerness to get going was matched by a lack of any action elsewhere and yet he couldn't settle to writing. Charles had bought a car and had been trying it out by motoring from one friend's house to another across the southern counties. He wouldn't be back for a day or so. There was no further word from Mary. What was she doing, he wondered. How did she pass the weeks in Cambridge?

After a couple of days' reluctant progress on his book, a letter finally brought good and bad news. Dr Bertram Chilvers, Holmwood Nursing Home, Fairford, Gloucestershire (proprietors Dr B.G.S. Chilvers MD, and G.H. Chilvers) would be delighted to show him round his establishment and discuss possible treatment for Captain Robert Bartram. Trains ran from Paddington to Fairford, changing at Oxford. The station was on the outskirts of town but it was only a ten-to fifteen-minute walk. If Mr Bartram let them know what train he would be catching, a car could be sent to fetch him. If he required accommodation overnight, it could be arranged at the local hotel. It would be helpful, it concluded, if he could obtain a letter from Captain Robert Bartram's doctor to assist in an assessment of his condition.

'Damn,' said Laurence aloud. 'Damn, damn, damn.'

He considered forging a letter of referral but realised almost as soon as he'd hit on the idea that it was hopeless. Doctors all knew each one another and anyway he was sure to get the vocabulary wrong and they'd smell a rat. At the very least he would have to account for the absence of such a letter.

Suddenly he thought of Eleanor Bolitho. Could she help him construct a plausible document? While she had as good as asked him not to disturb William again, he could, under the guise of answering her letter to him, ask for help. He dashed off a note to her before dining at Charles's club.

When he arrived in Pall Mall, he could tell Charles was eager to talk, but they got dragged into a small group digging in on their positions on the gold standard. Finally, as brandy was brought into the smoking room, Charles, who had been fidgeting with impatience throughout the latter part of their dinner, could describe his attempted pursuit of Mrs Lovell's son.

'Truth is, old chap, he doesn't exist. Bought this new book, fresh off the press—bound to come in handy:
Officers Died in the Great War.
Five dead Lovells in there. Not a lucky name. But not our man. The first...' He counted off on his fingers: 'Colonel Frederick Lovell: career soldier and far too old from what you've told me. Number two: Captain M. St J. Lovell RFC—a possibility, but then we have number three: his brother Lieutenant H.B.E. Lovell. He died in 1917, but I think you said our boy's an only son. Four, Captain Bruce Lovell, went down with Kitchener on the
Hampshire
en route to Archangel in 1916. Best hope,' his finger hovered, 'was five: another subaltern, Royal Fusiliers, enlisted in London, nineteen years old: Richard Ranelagh Lovell. Promising but he's too early: missing in action, Mons, 1914.'

'Missing?' Laurence said.

'Yes, missing, but it's pretty certain what happened to him. I checked. Was seen badly wounded but pressing on. Seen to be shot again and falling, and by his adjutant. Know that man myself, as it happens. Married to a cousin. Third cousin, really. I'm off to see him for the weekend. Two soldiers in his platoon saw this Lovell's body but they had no chance to bury him. Body gone by the time anyone got back there. Whole place was unrecognisable by then. Him too, no doubt. So it's simple,' he concluded dramatically. 'Your Master Lovell didn't die in the Great War.'

Laurence responded slowly, without pointing out that it wasn't
his
Lovell. 'Perhaps, though I can't think how, he isn't dead, then? Perhaps he survived?'

Charles was beaming before he had finished the sentence. Laurence had gone exactly where he intended.

'No suitable Lovell dead
or
alive, old chap. All checked. Friends plus Army List. Of eight surviving Lovells, four left the army: one's a barrister; one lives on an annuity; two returned home north of the border; one went to South Africa; one, a Lovell-Brace, is a Hampshire landowner. One Lovell is still serving and currently head of the Staff College. No dead commissioned Lowells in the right place either. I remembered you weren't sure of the spelling the first time you mentioned him, or rather her, the heiress of Parliament Hill. Perhaps the lady's a fraud?'

Laurence thought that Charles was much cleverer than he let on and that he also had a great deal too much time on his hands.

'No,' he said, 'I'm quite certain that she had a son and that he was killed. She thought John might be a friend of his.' To manufacture grief like hers, he thought, would have required the skills of a consummate actress.

He left late, declining Charles's invitation to bring Mary Emmett to the Savoy next week. He knew Charles would try to pick up the bill, which Laurence would indeed have trouble meeting, but he also wanted to keep Mary to himself for the time being. As he walked home briskly in the cold he realised that his one certainty—that the deaths of Emmett and Lovell were connected—had been obliterated by Charles's energetic enquiries.

That night he wrote to Mary and remembered to ask whether he could have the photograph of the soldiers in the farmyard. He wanted to see if William Bolitho could identify any of those in it. He told her that he had not really advanced his search and he hoped she wouldn't be disappointed. Even so, there were some things he kept to himself.

In the morning a letter came from Eleanor Bolitho. She agreed to meet him the next day in a teashop he'd suggested near the British Museum. She would have to leave spot on four to fetch her son, she said.

When he arrived she was already waiting, her elbows on the table, reading a book. He read the spine of it as he struggled for a moment to pull his arm from his coat before sitting down. It was John Galsworthy's
The Man of Property.